These camermen were creative geniuses, to be sure. They were the first to work a concept never seen before, never dreamed of by most people, yet they are barely mentioned in early silent film studies. Wonderful to have these cameramen on film. That's one for the archives! Thank you for posting.
That was amazing! The hanging miniature was such a clever idea! The way they had cowboys really race the chariots for 5000$. All the ways they played with light. That was an interesting documentary.
*Buster Keaton ... I’d rather rewatch him and my Chaplin favs as well as our other respected pioneers of the genre repeatedly ad Infinitum* than most things modern. Unless they’re modern takes on older material for the sake of preservation. Like moving film to digital archives. So our ancestors don’t forget what *American Culture used to be with proper diction and enunciation and actual literacy and a non-monosyllabic repertoire without coming across as overly loquacious and accidentally snobbish. *Think Gore Vidal, (even Norman mailer) Dorothy kilgallen, Dick Cavette, Tom Snyder. Noam Chomsky. Etc etc. I don’t care about HD quality or FPS or nits or whatever jargon they use nowadays. America used to have a true grand culture worth respecting and appreciating. Not what it’s devolved into currently due to 1337 leet speak and autocorrect and near illiteracy condoned and actually made popular by our current generations ‘role models’ and what most of the world considers a sick joke of an educational system Sorry please excuse my outburst. I feel pretentious and almost like the very thing I’m complaining about now. I know many of you and us and our peers and acquaintances are perfectly admirable and I’m just making unfair broad oversimplifications and generalizations to prove a personal opinion passing it off at a factual point
The actor is Rudolph Valentino, the actress dancing with him is Beatrice Dominguez. The clip is from the movie "The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse" made in 1921. She died in 1921 at the age of 24 from peritonitis after her appendix ruptured. Oddly enough. Valentino died in 1926 at the age of 31 from the same thing.